assorted ramblings by Jamis Buck

Programming Language Survey Results

22 February 2011 —
The results of a recent survey are presented and analyzed
—
3-minute read

A couple of weeks ago (already!) I asked two simple questions of my Twitter followers: what are (up to) four programming languages that you know and love, and what are (up to) four programming languages that you would like to learn?

Around the time I asked the question, I had almost 4200 followers on Twitter. Of those 4200, 38 responded. That’s almost one percent, and it is most definitely not a large enough sample from which to draw meaningful conclusions! Even if all 4200 of my twitter followers responded, it would still have been a strongly biased survey: most people following me on twitter are (or were) Ruby/Rails programmers, or found me through some other Ruby/Rails programmer. Asking this group what their favorite languages are is bound to have some strong biases.

And, sure enough, the top ten “know-and-love” languages among the 38 respondents were:

ruby (32)

javascript (25)

java (13)

python (9)

c (9)

c# (7)

php (6)

c++ (5)

perl (4)

lisp (4)

Compare that to the top ten “want-to-learn” languages:

erlang (22)

objective-c (12)

clojure (12)

python (12)

lisp (10)

haskell (9)

scala (9)

lua (5)

r (5)

c (5)

Ruby didn’t even make that list! (It actually came in at #11.)

So, what I’m trying to say is, the data is strongly slanted toward the preferences of Rails programmers who enjoy Ruby as a programming language. Still, there are some interesting tidbits to find here. I am definitely not a statistician, but here are four points that emerged that I found enlightening:

Every respondent included at least one object-oriented language among their know-and-love’s. For most people, that was Ruby, but Java, Python, C++, Objective-C, and others were mentioned, too. 17 people mentioned two object-oriented languages, and 17 more mentioned three. Three people gave all four of their know-and-love languages as object-oriented languages. What do I take away from this? All we really know is that object-oriented languages are apparently widely taught/learned among my twitter followers. No surprise there!

Only 8 respondents indicated that they know-and-love a functional language. Six people gave only a single functional language among their four know-and-loves, one more gave two, and one more gave three. Is this because people don’t love functional languages? Definitely not. There is simply not enough data to draw any conclusions about why this number is smaller than OO languages, but it does make you wonder, doesn’t it? Are programmers with predominantly OO backgrounds intimidated by functional paradigms? As you’ll see in the next question, it’s definitely not a lack of interest!

The four functional languages that people gave as “know-and-love” are:

lisp (4)

haskell (3)

erlang (3)

clojure (1)

Now, compare that with the next point:

33 of the 38 respondents wanted to learn at least one functional language. That’s almost 87%, versus only 21% that already knew a functional language. There is some serious curiosity there; people know OO, but want to learn functional. And what functional languages are people curious about?

erlang (22)

clojure (12)

lisp (10)

haskell (9)

scheme (2)

ocaml (2)

ml (1)

f# (1)

Erlang, far and away, is the one most people are curious about. Interesting!

The last point: 32 respondents included at least one object-oriented language in their want-to-learn list. 12 people wanted to learn one OO language, 16 wanted to learn two, and four people wanted to learn three OO languages. Which languages?

python (12)

objective-c (12)

scala (9)

lua (5)

ruby (4)

c# (3)

smalltalk (3)

java (2)

javascript (2)

c++ (1)

io (1)

coffeescript (1)

groovy (1)

Curiouser and curiouser! I love that a predominantly Ruby-centric group wants Python and Objective-C above all others. ObjC actually makes sense to me, even aside from the popularity of iOS as a platform. ObjC has many similarities to Ruby, and is a great language for Rubyists. Python, though…I love that it’s tied for #1. It shows a certain open-mindedness in the Ruby community, which gives me warm fuzzies.

Anyway, I’ll say it again: there really wasn’t a large enough sample set to draw meaningful conclusions here. But it’s still fun to look at seeming patterns in the data. Hopefull you’ve found something useful here, too!

Reader Comments

Interesting poll. Lua is not, however, an object-oriented language. It is a multi-paradigm language which is often used with a procedural or functional style. Python is multi-paradigm too but it is often used as an object-oriented language and it has specific features to support that style.

I would say the reason Ruby-ists want to learn Python might be the same than why they want to learn R: it is widely used in the scientific community and has top-of-the-class libraries for numerical programming, data mining, language processing, plots…

catwell22 Feb 2011

@catwell, for the purposes of my post, Lua is object-oriented “enough”. The term “multi-paradigm”, on the other hand, is meaningless. It really just means the language has features that the language designer believes fall into multiple different categories.

Good point about Python, though. That makes a lot of sense.

Jamis22 Feb 2011

I didn’t know coffeescript is considered a programming language. In case it just returns a js script.

renan11 May 2011

@renan, well, Java just compiles to bytecode, and C just compiles to machine code. Ruby 1.8 doesn’t even compile to anything, its just converted to a parse tree and interpreted. You could probably even write a parser to convert Ruby (maybe even just a subset) to Javascript, but that doesn’t make Ruby not a programming language.

The target environment where the code will be executed doesn’t define what is a language and what isn’t. If it has a syntax, it’s a language, and CoffeeScript definitely fits that bill.

Theoretically, CoffeeScript could be compiled to any other environment; right now, it’s target is just Javascript.